MSNBC Trots Out Life-Sized Liberal Buckets of Tears Griswold, Tribe to Bash SCOTUS

Curtis Houck
March 4th, 2024 3:43 PM

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Depending on the outcome of the November presidential election, Monday, March 4, 2024 could go down as a day of infamy for the left as the Supreme Court unanimously ruled former President Trump couldn’t be removed from states like Colorado, Illinois, and Maine, no matter how hard leftist loons tried. 

The noon Eastern hour of MSNBC served as a wake of sorts with Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) and Harvard University professor emeritus Laurence Tribe filling their proverbial buckets of tears onto crestfallen views. Not surprisingly, fill-in host Katy Tur did nothing to grapple with reality and instead helped her fellow leftists try to see themselves as still in the right.

Griswold followed Tribe and, from start to finish, it was a work of art. Tur put her partisan thumb print on the segment form the get-go with this petty swipe at the Supreme Court by referring to Griswold as actually “elected” to her post and “says Donald Trump is still an oath breaking insurrectionist.”

Asked for an initial reaction, the firmly-eyed Griswold fretted she feels such “disappointment” and, despite the unanimous ruling, “states should be able under our institution to bar oathbreaking insurrectionists”. But, for now, since “Congress is a merely non-functioning body,” Griswold argued, “it will be up to the American voters to save our democracy in November.”

Tur lobbed a softball if there was “anything within this decision that surprised you,” but Griswold didn’t and was instead allowed to go uninterrupted as she projected X-rated fear porn (click “expand”):

I would have liked the decision a little sooner. As of Thursday night, over 400,000 ballots were already cast in the Republican primary for President. I think the larger picture is it’s as clear as day what Donald Trump did: He incited that violent mob to rush on to the Capitol to try to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power. And his attacks and his allies’ attacks on our democracy have not stopped.

Their lies and disinformation have led to massive voter suppression efforts to threats against election workers and actually attacks on our election infrastructure. And they’re already laying the groundwork to undermine 2024. Regardless of this decision, American democracy still remains very much under attack and that threat and this upcoming election will be crucial for democracy survival in the United States.

Tur responded by directly asking what she made of voters who want back Trump, but Griswold showed no such courtesy, instead praising those who’ve “have stepped up to safeguard American democracy” and called on them to save “our fundamental freedoms” like “[t]he idea that women should have control over our own bodies” and “democracy should remain in tact”. 

Despite it being unanimous, Tur closed with two softballs about whether Griswold has “confidence in the Supreme Court” and if she “thinks this Court is partisan”. On the first, Griswold paid lip service to following the ruling, but otherwise lambasted it as an illegitimate body and, on the second, stated it is.

 

 

Because Griswold is the ideal rich, white, liberal woman, she had to screech about Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife (click “expand”):

TUR: Do you have confidence in the Supreme Court?

GRISWOLD: I would say as an office-holder, it is my job to uphold the decision of the United States Supreme Court and that’s why I’ve always said from the beginning of this litigation that I’ll follow what the United States Supreme Court decides, even if I disagree with them, which I do. I think the Supreme Court has issued bad decisions on democracy. I think what’s happening in this country for American women is horrendous. The idea that the overturning of Roe is leading women to not be able to access fertility treatment in the state of Alabama. And, overall, again, the United States Supreme Court decision will not be the make it or break it as to whether democracy survives. The make it or break it will be the American people and that’s who I have the utmost trust in.

TUR: Do you think this Court is partisan?

GRISWOLD: I think this Court has had obviously some pretty big issues, whether it has been, you know, Clarence Thomas’ wife’s role, gifts that have gone unreported, and there are some pretty big decisions that have come out of the the Court that I highly disagree with and I think strip Americans of our basic human rights and fundamental freedoms. With that said, we live in a country of rule of law. We have to respect the Court’s decisions while disagreeing with them. And honestly, I think that’s something that MAGA Republicans could take a lesson from. It’s okay to disagree with decisions and one another and not turn into violent rhetoric and attempts to steal elections. You win cases. You lose cases. Just like elections. And what we need Donald Trump to understand is that there are losers and winners in elections. And if you lose an election, that does not mean it’s stolen from you. And that does not give you the ability to have, incite an assault on the United States Capitol and the country.

Of course, Tur did nothing to challenge these screaming hot takes and thus signaled her agreement.

Rewind to Tribe and Tur was just as partisan. She began by wanting to talk about “the concurring opinions”, but briefly (and inaccurately) rephrased it to “dissent” from “the three liberal justices” in which they bemoaned how “the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office.”

Tribe speaks with the speed of molasses in January and meandering of an NPR host, but it was nonetheless dangerous as he claimed the insurrection portion of the 14th Amendment is now “dead” because five justices behaved like a “Super Legislature” and“ left...unenforceable, the Constitution’s main protection for democracy when it is threatened by a would-be dictator who tries to overthrow the Constitution, stay in power”.

Tur was fascinated by this apocalyptic rhetoric and asked Tribe to go further. Sure enough, he did by attacking voters as stupid if they vote for Trump and claimed Congress would better serve Americans if it were run by people like Jamie Raskin (D-MD) (click “expand”):

TUR: So, you say it’s basically unenforceable. The Court is saying the Congress needs to — to pass a statute. Can you explain the mechanism here? Explain how that would work.

TRIBE: Well, in fact, we’re going to see it in realtime. Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff and others have worked on a possible law that Congress could pass, and no one doubts that it has the power to pass it, under part of the 14th Amendment that says Congress has the power to enforce the provisions of this amendment by all appropriate legislation. So if we imagined, and it takes quite an imagination, a Congress that was really functional with someone other than Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House, who would allow a majority to work its will — if we imagine a Congress that could act like a normal Congress, then what it would do is pass a law that would provide a mechanism, a mechanism very much like the one that Colorado used except it would be one for the nation as a whole by which a would be federal official is challenged before the election — not after the election, which would cause chaos — challenged on the ground that that official, having taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, tried to overturn it by not accepting a loss when there is a fair election that tells that person your time is up. You’ve got to go. That would not be a very hard statute to write except when you have a Congress that is dysfunctional and unwilling to write about just about any law that does anything. What you’re basically saying is the country is hostage to someone who engaged in insurrection and notice nothing the Court said today denied the claim that Donald Trump did just that. They leave that question open. We have someone who tried to overthrow the Constitution by saying I may have lost the election but I’m going to figure out a way to stay in power any way. That person can try again. And the belief of the authors of the 14th Amendment that allowing voters to get basically snookered into giving that sort of person power is not at adequate remedy. You need to disqualify such a person. But if Congress can’t get its act together, then the person can just ride on the fake information that he or she may propound in order to get elected.

After Tur praised the three liberal justices for implicitly labeling Trump “an oathbreaking insurrectionist” and Tribe ripped the Court for “drag[ging] out” the issue of presidential immunity, the pair ended with more pie-in-the-sky lunacy about the Court punting a weighty issue of presidential immunity and the Court deciding the election (click “expand”):

TRIBE: We won’t be able to put him on trial until after the election and, if he should win that election, he will certainly make the whole case go away. So —

TUR: Let me ask you, hold on. When you say remanded back to Judge Chutkan, is that to decide the scope of presidential immunity before they decide whether Donald Trump violated the law with what he did on January 6?

TRIBE: — exactly. It would basically require Judge Chutkan to decide something she has not yet decided and that is which of the precise acts that a president might commit that violate various criminal statutes are within the outer perimeter of his presidential duties. That’s not an easy question to decide and say that she basically has to lay out a roadmap for all of the issues of presidential immunity before Donald Trump can go to trial is like saying we’ll wait to hell freezes over. That’s not going to happen anytime soon. And so, just as in this case by taking on more than the case actually required, the Court was indirectly allowing the former President to drag things out so long that for all practical purposes, he gets immunity even though everybody might agree that what he did in trying to stay in office, even with violence if necessary, has no appropriate immunity under the Constitution.

TUR: So you’re saying that’s a possibility. If they were to remand it, they could also decide for themselves where the immunity lies. They could make that definition themselves, correct?

TRIBE: They certainly could, but that would only happen if they were eager, if there were five justices that had any eagerness to get that case done before the election. And we know they’re not because, by postponing the argument until the week of April 22 when it could have been argued much sooner just as the Court had, in Bush vs. Gore, argued things basically from one day to the next, by doing that, they made clear that they have no interest in getting that case resolved. So, the Court, in these indirect ways, is showing that it is tilting the playing field in support of the former President.

Tur was in awe as she thanked him: “Laurence Tribe, always good to have you. As you can see, I could talk about this for the whole hour”.

To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from March 4, click here.

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